Page 324 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

must take a fresh grip on her game situation, or it will get away from her, after all.
Not another prairie chicken or woodcock should be killed in Wisconsin between 1912and1922. Whenanysmallbirdbecomessoscarcethatthebaglimitneedsto be cut down to five, as it now is for the above in Wisconsin, it is time to stop for ten years, before it is too late.
Wisconsin should immediately busy herself about the creation of bird and game preserves.
For goodness sake, Wisconsin, stop killing squirrels as "game!" You ought to know better—and you do ! Leave that form of barbarism for the Benighted States.
Andpassalawshuttingoutthemachineguns. Theyareadisgracetoourcountry, andascourgetoourgame. Continuallyaretheyleadinggoodmenastray.
Extend the term of your State Warden to four years.
Wyoming:
The State of Wyoming once had a magnificent heritage of game. It embraced the Rocky Mountain species, and also those of the great plains. Firstandlast,thestatehasworkedhardtoprotectherwildlife, and hold the killing of it down to a decent basis.
As far back as 1889, I met on the Shoshone River a very wide-awake warden, actually "on his job," who was maintained by a body of private citizens headed by Col. Pickett and known as the Northern Wyoming GameProtectiveAssociation. Andeventhenwesawthatthelawswere too liberal for the game. In one man's cold-storage dug-out we saw enough sheep, deer and elk meat to subsist a company of hungry dra- goons, all killed and possessed according to law.
In the protection of her mountain game, Wyoming has had a hard task. In the Yellowstone Park between 1889 and 1894, the poachers for the taxidermists of Livingston and elsewhere slaughtered 270 bison out of 300; and Howell was the only man caught. England can protect game in far-distant mountains and wildernesses; but America can not,—or at
leastwedon't! Withus,menlivinginremoteplaceswhofindwildgame
about them say " To h—
and out of season, females and males; and the average local jury simply will not convict the average settler who is accused of such a trifling in- discretion as killing game out of season when he "needs the meat."
And so, with laws in full force protecting females, the volume of big game steadily disappears, everywhere west of the Alleghanies where the lawpermitsbig-gamehunting! Aninterestingchaptermightbewritten on game exterminated according to law.
The deadly defects in the protection of western big game are Structural weakness in the enforcement of the laws Collusion between offenders for the suppression of evidence; Perjury on the witness stand;
Dishonesty and disloyalty on the part of local jurors when friends are on trial;
!
withthelaw" Theykillonthesly,inseason
;:
302 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE